Ruby Tuesdays
Thursday, February 2nd, 2006Yes, I’m a fricken geek. We already know this. For fun and pleasure I enjoy talking to computers and trying to convince them to do things. Lately I’ve been looking into Ruby, a very clean programming language that’s getting a lot of hype in the web dev community for it’s “killer app”, Ruby on Rails. Since Tanya has been doing a lot of yelling at me lately, trying to prompt me to get out of the house and interact with people more, I decided to go to the local Ruby Users Group meeting last Tuesday.
I have to say, I was quite surprised at the number of people there. There were probably close to twenty people, but I guess part of that is due to the good PR Ruby has been getting. About half of the people were really new to Ruby, some of them hadn’t even installed it yet. The other half seemed to consist of Java developers, and system and database admins.
There were two lectures/presentations. The first one was on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby in Java (similar to Jython, a project I was following for a while and even did a logo for). The second was about Watir, the Web Application Testing In Ruby framework. Very, very cool, I must say. Unfortunately, since it only currently works with IE on Windows, it doesn’t help me much. But, if you’re a Windows monkey and you work on web sites, this is definitely something to look into.
So, needless to say, I think I’ll try to hit the next one, the last Tuesday of February. They’re going to be building a site for a non-profit in the Twin Cities, which is really awesome… maybe I’ll try to contribute. I’m also thinking about making a presentation of my own about building Jabber bots with Ruby. What better way to learn something than force yourself to give a presentation on it. :)
UPDATE: The new Ruby Users of Minnesota site is at Ruby.MN